Businessman Hans Werner T. had always had a knack for exotic deals. Who else would hit on the idea of renting out extras to the U.S. Army "to act as realistic civilians during maneuvers in the Upper Palatinate (Northeast Bavaria)." T.'s company Optronic, located in Königsbronn, even undertook the casting of amateur actors who would be paid 92 Euros a day for walk-on parts as beggars or noisy demonstrators.

Then there was another rather unusual Optronic customer - the Nam Chon Gang Corporation. Three years ago North Korean businessmen started ordering angle grinders and vacuum pumps for their Stalinist country. That didn't have much to do with medical and safety technology, the official business of Optronic.

Nevertheless - these business deals were legal.

Thanks to the last order he received from Nam Chon Gang, which is headquartered in Pyongyang, Hans Werner T. has been in Stuttgart Stammheim prison for the last three months: It is alleged that he supplied them with 214 seamless aluminum tubes, 2.40 meters in length, and 22 cm in diameter, made with a special alloy. The German government had the container ship Ville de Virgo, which was already under sail, intercepted at the Suez Canal. It was carrying the shipment toward the Far East without an export permit. (SPIEGEL 18/2003).

From a legal perspective the plot of the who-done-it seems clear: The public prosecutor in Stuttgart has accused T. of violating the foreign trade regulations in his business deals. And even an offer to pay a fine of two million Euros did not result in his release. The businessman T. claims that a Hamburg company, not he, was responsible for the export transaction. The trial is to start this fall. There's no telling what the foreign policy consequences of all this will be. Toward the end of June, Urenco in Gronau, Westphalia, which runs the only uranium enrichment plant in Germany, submitted a documented expert report. Since then the suspicion has existed that the North Koreans wanted to purchase material in Germany for their nuclear program, the existence of which was uncovered last fall. Urenco was convinced that the tubes were intended for the construction of gas ultracentrifuges, which are used in the process of enriching uranium for use in nuclear bombs. "It's a smoking gun," says Mark Hibbs of the technical journal Nucleonics Week, an expert on North Korea.

The German government considers this a delicate situation - in part because of the escalating controversy between the U.S. and North Korea. Three weeks ago in Berlin, Pentagon advisor Richard Perle was already blustering that perhaps the North Korean atomic plants would have to be bombed to preserve the peace. The hardliners in the White House consider this German connection - about which the U.S. government is asking to be kept fully informed - further evidence of the North Korean dictator Kim Yong Il's nuclear plans.

The first shipment of 22.127 metric tons of aluminum tubes apparently was to be only a beginning. Investigators know from letters that are now in their hands, that Nam Chon Gang was interested in obtaining a total of 200 metric tons of the light metal. Hibbs estimates that such an amount would be sufficient for "3,500 centrifuges which could year after year produce about 90 kg (198 lb.) of highly enriched uranium," enough for at least half a dozen nuclear bombs.

Experts are debating whether the North Korean dictator already has a working uranium enrichment program. The CIA believes it has evidence that Pakistan helped Kim's scientists with the necessary know-how. Pyongyang is even believed to have obtained prototypes of the centrifuges this way.

Pakistan has consistently denied the accusation. But there is circumstantial evidence in the Urenco report that makes their official denial look dubious. The experts have established that the dimensions of the tubes ordered in Germany correspond strikingly with the dimensions of the tubes that Urenco used in the seventies in constructing centrifuges. The conclusion is that North Korea may be producing a centrifuge based on the European model. A Pakistani scientist stole the blueprints from Urenco in 1975.

The North Koreans continue to stubbornly deny that the shipment was intended for them. Nam Chon Gang, according to the official North Korean version, intended to sell the material to the Chinese aircraft company, Shenyang Aircraft Corporation; the Chinese were said to be planning to make transportable gas tanks from it.

Giving this as the purpose, a permit for the first shipment had already been applied for at the German Export Control Office. There, the story seemed so ridiculous to officials that they felt no need for an expert report and refused to issue an export permit back in February. The gas tank version was "technologically implausible," the letter they sent to Optronic said. The officials shrewdly judged that it was much more realistic to assume that the material was intended for use in the North Korean nuclear weapons program.